1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a system and method for computer assisted medical diagnosis. Specifically, the present invention relates to a method and system for lesion detection procedures in diagnostic imaging.
2. Description of Related Art
A number of areas in diagnostic imaging have advanced rapidly, which makes a large amount of data readily available to medical personnel. However, advantages from these technological advancements also lead to new problems. For example, CT based cancer screening has progressed significantly. Different CT procedures enable large amount of data to be generated, which usually require tremendous effort from radiologists to examine such data to reach medical conclusions. To improve efficiency in processing such information, certain protocols governing medical data interpretation have been put in place. Although such protocols may assist radiologists to perform data interpretation in a more structured manner, performance of radiologists often varies significantly due to the amount of data. Such inconsistency complicates diagnostic decision making.
Second, various lesion/cancer databases have been established to encourage information exchange and sharing. One important application of such databases is to develop, test, and validate computer algorithms designed to detect and characterize different types of lesion/cancer. Effective use of such cancer databases often requires the availability of ground truth for lesion/cancer present in medical images and such ground truth is preferably validated by other means such as biopsies. However, due to the high cost of and extreme difficulty in acquiring ground truth, approximate ground truth is often used, which may be generated using lesion/cancer marks manually created by physicians. Unfortunately, establishing consistent lesion/cancer marks has proven to be very difficult. This is due to the fact that lesion/cancer markings of a patient study created by a radiologist at different times or by different radiologists often exhibit considerable variations. The former is called intra-observer inconsistency and the latter is called inter-observer inconsistency.
Generating consistent lesion/cancer markings has become a critical problem in diagnostic imaging and analysis. Recent research shows that markings created by radiologists at an expert level often have the same problem. Although this problem has attracted much attention, no effective solution has been proposed that adequately addresses the problem.